LinkedIn Shares Popped: What You Need to Know

Although we don't believe in timing the market or panicking over market movements, we do like to keep an eye on big changes -- just in case they're material to our investing thesis.

What: Freshly minted shares of business-minded social network LinkedIn (NYSE: LNKD) exploded right way, soaring as high as $92.99 after opening at $45 per share for a peak pop of 106.6%.

So what: As of this writing, just before lunch, 11.6 million shares had changed hands at an average price of about $86. That's just about $1 billion of paper-pushing in half a day's worth of action. To put that number into perspective, large-cap market darlings Baidu (Nasdaq: BIDU) and Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) typically attract about $1 billion of market action a day -- with market caps of $46 billion and $90 billion, respectively.

Now what: Okay, so everyone wants a piece of the new kid on the block. But LinkedIn's prospectus is full of bright-eyed membership-boosting plans with very little economic value. Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) shares climbed steadily for years after its storied IPO but Vonage Holdings (NYSE: VG) crashed and burned immediately. There's no way to know which way LinkedIn is going next, which makes me want to wait until we can buy volatility-happy options on the stock instead of the uncertain shares themselves.

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